Personality in monkeys: Factor analyses of rhesus social behaviour

Three factor analyses were performed on social interaction data from 168 juvenile macaques. Animals were tested in stable quadrad peer groups; in newly-formed dyads with infant, juvenile, and adult stimulus monkeys; and in similar triads with the stimulus animal plus a familiar cage-mate. Factors emerged, most strongly in the most stable condition, which were interpreted as affiliative, hostile and fearful. These factors were almost entirely independent and resembled the extraversion, psychoticism, and emotionality factors frequently found in humans.     

Trait anxiety,anxious mood,and threat detection

Abstract

Subjects were required to detect either an angry or a happy target face in a stimulus array of 12 photographs. It was found with neutral distractor faces that those high in trait anxiety detected angry faces faster than did low trait-anxious subjects, but the two groups did not differ in their speed of detection of happy targets. In addition, high trait-anxious subjects detected happy target faces slower than low trait-anxious subjects when the distractor faces were angry. Comparable findings were obtained whether or not there was anxious mood induction. It was concluded that high trait-anxious individuals have facilitated detection and processing of environmental threat relative to low trait-anxious subjects, which enhance performance when the target is threatening, but which impair performance when the distractors are threatening.